Managing and Updating Stationery

Designing Stationery » Designing, Deploying, and Managing Stationery » Managing and Updating Stationery

Once you deploy your Stationery, manage its use to make sure it continues to meet your needs. Your source document templates and standards can change over time. Make sure your source document templates support your Stationery and keep these files updated as a unit. If you add a style to your Word or FrameMaker template, also add it to your Stationery design project and update your Stationery.

You may also decide to add a feature to your output, such as expand/collapse sections or popup windows. To add a feature, you may need to make changes to both your source document templates and your Stationery. Then, you need to put together a deployment or roll-out plan to help writers decide when and how each project should use the features.

If you move or change the Stationery, ePublisher Express notifies the writers when they open their projects. The writers have the opportunity to synchronize their projects with the Stationery and bring their projects inline with your new standards. For more information, see Synchronizing Projects with Stationery.

Be careful when you update your Stationery to make sure you have the files you need. Review the following considerations for properly maintaining your Stationery:

Store your Stationery design project and supporting files in a version control system. This process allows you to monitor how it changes over time and ensures you can return to a previous version, if needed.

Create a subfolder in your Stationery design project and store a sample of each source document type in that folder. These files help you test and verify the output as you modify your source document styles and your ePublisher styles and settings.

Do not directly open and modify the Stationery files. To make sure your Stationery is properly updated, always open the Stationery design project for the Stationery, make your changes, and then save a new copy of the Stationery.

Consider saving your updated project as Stationery to a new location and have several writers test some smaller projects with the updated Stationery before you update your Stationery for all projects.

When you save your Stationery, ePublisher creates the following folders that contain information about any customizations or overrides you created when you developed the Stationery:

StationeryName\Formats\OutputFormat

StationeryName\Formats\OutputFormat.base

where StationeryName is the name you specified for the Stationery, and OutputFormat is the type of output format you specified for a target in the Stationery. You can use these folders to help you identify any customizations or overrides you specified for your Stationery when updating your Stationery.

The StationeryName\Formats\OutputFormat folder contains any customizations or overrides you specified when designing the Stationery. ePublisher Express synchronizes with the files in the OutputFormat folder and uses the information about customizations and overrides contained in files in the OutputFormat folder to generate output.

Note: The Stationery may have one or more OutputFormat folders, based on the settings you specified in your Stationery.

The StationeryName\Formats\OutputFormat.base folder contains copies of all the files located in the \Program Files\WebWorks\ePublisher\2024.1\Formats\OutputFormat folder. These files define the default output format and transforms and are installed by default when you install ePublisher.

You can do a compare, or diff, between the files located in these folders to quickly see any customizations or overrides specified for the Stationery. You can use this information to help you reapply customizations and overrides as needed when designing a newer version of the Stationery in ePublisher Designer.

To update your Stationery

1. Open your Stationery design project.

2. Make the desired changes.

3. On the File menu, click Save as Stationery.

4. Specify the Stationery name, location to store the Stationery, and the targets to include in the Stationery. To replace the existing Stationery, specify the same name and values as the existing Stationery. You do not have to replace the existing Stationery. You can also create a new Stationery with a different name, such as by adding a version number to the Stationery name.

5. Click OK.

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Last modified date: 06/11/2024